Tesco. Poster-child of the data-driven retail experience, thanks to its loyalty card and early work with DunnHumby. But Tom Hebbert didn’t talk about that. Instead, he focused on their supply chain work. Rough notes from the session follow. Big Data projects deliver huge returns at Tesco; improving promotions to ensure 30% fewer gaps on shelves, […]

SaaS, or Shopping as a Service is killing retail. If there was one investment or model that I would have considered safe forever – say 20 years ago, it would be retail. If I had, I was sure wrong. The Internet and sales tax laws are conspiring to make retail a thing of the past. […]

Amazon and other online retailers like EBay might not be able to dodge the tax collection business for much longer as States try increasingly to find new areas of revenue. Over the last couple of weeks, both Colorado and California have started passing legislation in one form or another that will mean that Amazon will […]

The New York Times and Techflash are leading news this morning about Amazon and how it looks like it will become the Wal-Mart of the internet. The question is, is anyone ready to follow or take on Amazon on its own turf. All ecommerce companies should be looking at what Amazon is doing right now […]

Recently I wrote about PaaS by Amazon – an no, as much as we like thinking of Amazon as the the key Cloud Computing infrastructure provider, it wasn’t about Platform as a Service. It was about Pasta as a Service. Yes, I am buying Al Dente Carba-Nada as a subscription. After all, before it become […]

If you think this is yet-another post on Platform as a Service, you’re wrong. I leave all that complicated stuff to The Brain. I’ll be talking about much simpler things here: PaaS – Pasta as a Service TaaS – Tea as a Service GaaS – Groceries as a Service No kidding. Well, maybe a bit, […]

…And I am not even talking about TCO, calculating life-time cost with subscription. No, just plain simply purchase price, with a dirty industry trick: rebates. The long expected Palm Pre will be available from Spring on Jun 6th, at $199 with qualifying data plan, and after a $100 rebate. And therein lies the rub – […]

The consumer world is awash in information, a subject mentioned all around the place. Lifestreaming seeks to manage the data stream faced by consumers but what about the mountain of information that business users face? There is a real market for solutions that do the hard work on business data and serve up nice, easily […]